The Huntington Ingalls Industries-led team handling legacy nuclear-waste cleanup at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico might get kicked off the site in 2023, halfway through the potential end-date of its contract with the Department of Energy, multiple industry sources said this week.
DOE’s Office of Environmental Management awarded Newport News Nuclear BWXT Los Alamos (N3B) a potentially 10-year $1.4-billion legacy remediation contract in December 2017. In addition to the five-year base, which runs through April 2023, DOE holds one three-year option followed and one two-year option on the pact.
But based on conversations with five different industry sources this week, DOE may leave both options on the table and spin up a follow-on procurement in time to make a clean break from N3B as soon as two years from now.
It appears, several of the sources said, that DOE is disappointed with N3B’s performance since it took over remediation of land and waters around the national laboratory from former National Nuclear Security Administration site-management contractor Los Alamos National Security in April 2018.
On Thursday, one industry source said the complaints about N3B over the past three years mean DOE is likely to recompete the remediation contract unless the new Joe Biden administration pumps the brakes on the idea.
Another contractor with experience in New Mexico told Weapons Complex Monitor a week ago that, based on conversations he’s had with various parties around Los Alamos, DOE seems to have soured on N3B and may already be paving the way, behind the scenes, for the next cleanup competition.
This week, officials from three other companies reported hearing similar speculation, saying DOE’s growing dissatisfaction with N3B might mean the company gets no second act. However, these people said they had not heard about N3B’s fate directly from DOE’s Office of Environmental Management.
The Office of Environmental Management declined to comment.
For its part, the New Mexico Environment Department is not pleased with the way Los Alamos remediation is going. “We expect DOE to fulfill its clean-up obligations,” state agency spokeswoman Maddy Hayden said in a Friday email. “We are disappointed with the FY21 clean-up planning and timelines as presented. Whether that is attributable to DOE, its contractor – or both – is for DOE to determine,” she said.
“N3B is not privy to DOE procurement actions and therefore cannot speculate,” on what the agency will do, a spokesman for the contractor, Todd Nelson, said in an emailed statement Thursday. “While there are always opportunities to improve, we continue to receive positive feedback from DOE … We are very proud of the work we have accomplished on behalf of the DOE.”
N3B has “already made 35 TRU waste shipments off-site for permanent disposal and have about 20 more shipments certified as ready to go,” Nelson said.
N3B also responded “quickly and effectively” to the early 2020 discovery of legacy waste on DP Road, a public road located just outside laboratory grounds in Los Alamos County, said Nelson.
In January, N3B was awarded 82% of its total potential fee from DOE for its work at Los Alamos during fiscal 2020, although the contractor earned only 72% of the subjective portion. In the scorecard, the department forgave N3B for not meeting a couple of its performance-based incentives due to the COVID-19 pandemic, as the agency did for other contractors in 2020.
The latest N3B scorecard listed five “opportunities for improvement,” including better training and safety procedures to address “potential life-threatening consequences” that could arise when dealing with electrical equipment.
After several nuclear-safety lapses and the improperly packaged drum of Los Alamos waste that led to the 2014 underground radiation release at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, the DOE decided to separate the lab’s cleanup mission, including disposition of legacy waste generated between 1970 and 1998, from the lab management contract owned by the agency’s semi-autonomous National Nuclear Security Administration.
So, a little less than three years ago, DOE officially transitioned legacy nuclear cleanup at Los Alamos to N3B and the Office of Environmental Management from former lab-management contractor Los Alamos National Security and the National Nuclear Security Administration.
N3B has said it employs about 600 people. Two of industry sources who spoke to the Monitor for this story said N3B has had a hard time because many Los Alamos employees who worked for the old lab-management contractor, Los Alamos National Security, opted to work with the next lab-management contractor, Triad National Security, rather than N3B. The pay is better at the lab contractor, these sources said.
Triad, made up of Battelle, Texas A&M, and the University of California, replaced Los Alamos National Security in 2018 as the National Nuclear Security Administration’s lab management and operations contractor. Huntington Ingalls is also part of Triad, along with Fluor. Los Alamos National Security consisted of Bechtel, AECOM Management Services (now Amentum), BWX Technologies, and the University of California.
Should DOE recompete the Los Alamos legacy cleanup contract, it would draw significant interest from companies around the weapons complex, another source said.
It would also be another letdown for BWX Technologies (BWXT) on the nuclear cleanup front. In 2020, the Office of Environmental Management revoked a potentially $13-billion Hanford tank-waste contract from the BWXT-led Hanford Works Restoration.
It was a stiff one-two punch for BWXT, which only the year before saw another potentially lucrative liquid-waste contract slip through its fingers when DOE pulled the plug on the next major cleanup pact at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C. The agency in 2017 awarded a potentially $4.7 billion cleanup contract to the BWXT-led Savannah River EcoManagement, featuring Bechtel and Honeywell, but canned the whole procurement two years later after protests by losing bidders and second thoughts by the federal government about the appropriate scope of work for the contract.